When we left our heroes, Neo (Keanu Reeves) had been able to stop the machines himself, sending him into a coma. He had just made a choice to save Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) with the knowledge that Zion would be attacked within the next 24 hours. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) had discovered that the Oracle’s words may have all been false and he is utterly confused as to his purpose in the scheme. Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) has also been able to replicate himself in the real world…or something. I confess I get pretty confused about the mythology at this point.
So we open with Neo stuck in a coma between the matrix and the real world. In the matrix, he is stuck in a subway station where he talks to a girl and her family who inform him of the ‘trainman’ (The trainman, The oracle, The architect, The keymaker, The pretentious name) who controls the shift of programs from world to world. Unfortunately the Merovingian (The French-accented guy) controls him and has a bounty on Neo’s head. This requires Trinity, Morpheus, and Seraph (The Oracle’s protector) to go in and secure his release. This first 30 or 45 minutes is definitely the best part of the movie.
Why, you ask? Repeat after me: It takes place in the matrix, full of slow-mo special effects that are just awesome and dialogue that, even its pretentiousness, works. The conversation between the girl’s father and Neo is quite interesting and involving. But then, after this, we get thrown back into the grungy, dirty Zion. This was the biggest underlying problem with Reloaded; the Wachowski brothers were unable to give us a reason to care about Zion. Every character seemed to walk around with a sign telling their fates. And the dialogue! The dialogue that was so corny, melodramatic, and pathetic is back in brute force with this movie. Nearly every scene in Zion contains painful clichéd lines that ring with falseness and make you wince and crawl into your seat.
As the movie unfolds with each new scene including a meeting with the Oracle, the battle of Zion, and the water soaked final brawl between Smith and Neo, it all seems like something we’ve seen before. Perhaps it’s the poor way every plot point is so painstakingly revealed so that we already feel we know what’s going to happen. Maybe it’s because every scene in the movie feels like a stale retread of the first two movies. And it could be because every scene has so many special effects that we completely lose the human element of the story. But these are just a variety of choices for what’s wrong with the movie. You can pick your own when you see it.
But should you see it? If you’ve seen the first two, you’ll probably get suckered into the publicity hype surrounding this and see it regardless of how you think it looks. And with all the publicity, I don’t quite know how anything could have completely appeased me. It’s not that this is a bad movie - the final fight between Smith and Neo is great; it’s just rather dull. You sense everything coming and as you watch the special effects, you sense that the movie has lost its roots. There was a scene between teacher Morpheus and student Neo in the first movie that was simple, elegant, and awesome. This trilogy has completely lost sight of that.